


Need You To Need Me

by MaggieBee



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics), Harley Quinn (Comics), Wonder Woman (Comics)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/F, a bit angsty, but with lots of love, fluff(y), i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-03
Updated: 2016-04-03
Packaged: 2018-05-31 02:12:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6451366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaggieBee/pseuds/MaggieBee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There were a lot of weird or even unusual things about Harley Quinn - but her stubbornness and refusal to be taken care of were definitely the weirdest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Need You To Need Me

**Author's Note:**

> I ship those two like crazy and since there's almost no fanfiction about them I wrote some.

There were a lot of unusual or even weird things about Harley Quinn, however most of them Diana didn’t find particularly concerning. Other than her erratic sleep schedule and her affinity for eating pop tarts for dinner, none of her quirks had any negative impact on her health, so Diana mostly let her do as she pleased, admiring her girlfriend’s peculiarities from afar, and kissing her nose from time to time for good measure.

Not to mention Harley still called her ‘Wondy’ even though she’d told her countless times that she could use her first name just as well. Harley never listened though, so ‘Wondy’ it was and there was nothing Diana could do about it. The nickname had an element of childlike fascination to it, and so coming from Harley, it was strangely fitting. That didn’t change the fact that Diana had been slightly taken aback by it at first, but that’s what you did in a relationship – you adapted, and then sooner than you’d have thought you wouldn’t have it any other way.

Yet sometimes there still were things that Diana perceived as slightly worrying.

Like that one time, when Harley refused to let her carry even one grocery bag, so she ended up carrying all three of them herself, which ended with twelve broken eggs, a carton of spilled milk and a crying Harley. Or that other time, when she – even though she was sick out of her mind with fever – insisted on making breakfast, and then hid all the frying pans when Diana wouldn’t let her and tried to do it herself.

Almost every other week Diana would find something Harley was so weirdly stubborn and defensive about, and it had honestly stopped surprising her after a while. Which didn’t mean it wasn’t still worrying.

“Harley?”

The clown girl in question was too busy with hammering nails into a defenseless piece of wood to answer.

“Harley, what are you doing?”

“I’m buildin’ a shelf”, she answered shortly, the concentrated look on her face not even fading for a second.

Diana had stopped questioning things like these a while ago, yet she was nonetheless worried that her girlfriend might seriously hurt herself. She was by no means an expert, but she was pretty sure there were safer ways to handle a hammer and nails. Maybe Harley should stick to the big, wooden ones.

With a suspicious side-glance at her girlfriend, who had just very closely missed her thumb with the hammer, Diana sat down on the couch to read a magazine; Harley’s hammering an unusual and worry inducing background noise. She figured this was one of Harley’s surges of inspiration that happened every so often, and she’d rather not get involved.

Soon she lost herself in an interesting article, only occasionally glancing over the edge of the magazine whenever Harley started cursing or the hammering reached an alarming volume.

After about five minutes, the inevitable happened, and with a shriek Harley threw the hammer across the room. When Diana looked up, immediately alarmed, the blonde was clutching her apparently injured thumb. Diana tossed aside the magazine and hurried over to Harley, who had already started sniffling.

“Let me look at that”, she said softly, and tried prying Harley’s hand away from the injury. Harley whimpered.

Diana sighed at the sight of the thumb, which was already starting to turn various shades of blue.

“Ouchie”, Harley whined and tried to pull her hand away when Diana examined her finger further to make sure nothing was broken.

“I’m gonna go get the medical kit”, she said with another sigh, “and an ice pack. Stay put.”

Harley didn’t listen – it wasn’t like she ever listened – and quickly scrambled to her feet, clutching at her thumb again.

“Ya know what, I can doctor myself up just fine.”

She brushed past Diana towards the bathroom where they kept the first-aid kit.

“Harley-“

“I know what I’m doin’ Wondy, I’ve been to medical school.”

“Of course you do”, Diana muttered quietly enough for Harley not to hear her. It wasn’t like she thought Harley couldn’t handle herself when she was hurt. What did she have to prove here? She was very likely in a lot of pain, and Diana would have been glad to fix her up.

Instead she sat back onto the couch and watched as Harley emerged from the bathroom, first-aid kit in her uninjured hand.

“It’s bleedin’ now”, she announced and dropped the small blue box to the floor, “ya think that’s a bad sign?”

“You tell me, you’re the doctor”, Diana retorted and it came out a lot more bitter than she intended.

Harley ignored her anyway, sat down next to the medical kit and emptied its contents onto the floor right next to the mess she had previously made with her wooden boards and the nails.

Diana watched as she cleaned the wound as much as possible, wincing every once in a while, and then struggled to open one of the neatly wrapped Band-Aids with her injured thumb. She didn’t think it would do any good to tell her that a bandage was probably a better idea, so she kept quiet and watched Harley tear open the Band-Aid using her teeth.

She neatly wrapped it around her finger; however, the injury wasn’t completely covered and edges of pink, red and blue stuck out from both ends of the Band-Aid.

Diana sighed.

“Would you _please_ let me help you?”

Harley looked up at her, a defeated look on her face and pouted.

“Fine”, she mumbled, and Diana got to her knees next to her girlfriend and began looking for a bandage in the spilled contents of the medical kit. She had seen a lot of injuries in her time, and she knew very well how to properly treat them. It wasn’t like she thought Harley couldn’t help herself, she _had_ been to medical school after all. Still, she’d worked as a psychiatrist, and had since gone insane, so Diana wasn’t sure how freshly injury treatment was in her memory.

Harley let her treat her without further protest now, and Diana carefully wrapped her thumb in a white bandage.

When she was done and Harley was all fixed up, looking down at her thumb with a weird look on her face, Diana decided to ask the question she’d wanted to ask for a while now.

“Harley... Why do you always look like I kicked you in the face whenever I try to do something nice for you?”

Harley’s eyes widened and for a split second Diana imagined to see something like panic on her face.

“I don’t- that’s not true, I- no!”

The blonde defiantly crossed her arms in front of her chest, wincing shortly when she brushed against her thumb.

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

Diana raised her eyebrows.

“Oh, is it?” she asked, “do you by any chance recall what you did last Monday when I insisted on doing the dishes?”

Harley appeared to be thinking about it for a moment, before vehemently shaking her head.

“No, I don’t. I have no idea what ya talkin’ about, Wondy.”

“Really?” Diana asked, “you don’t remember sulking around the house for two hours for no reason at all?”

Harley didn’t respond. She looked down at her bandaged thumb, pouting.

“Harley...”, Diana said softly, “eventually you’ll have to tell me what this circus is about. You can’t make a scene every time I’m trying to help you or do something nice for you. This has to stop.”

Harley was chewing on her lower lip now, still not saying anything.

“Harley, if you just tell me what’s wrong, then I can-“

“I need you to _need_ me, okay?!” Harley finally burst out.

Her tiny hands were balled into fists – at least the one that wasn’t injured - and Diana imagined she could see tears collecting in her eyes.

“Otherwise you’re jus’ gonna get bored of me, kick me out eventually, and I’m gonna be all on my own. You’re all I have, Wondy. I mean it. And if you’re not willin’ to put up with me anymore, only God knows where I’m goin’ to end up.”

Diana could see how serious her girlfriend was about these insecurities of hers, yet still she couldn’t keep herself from smiling a tiny little bit. In what world was it possible to get _bored_ around someone like Harley Quinn? She had been trying to build a god damned _shelf_ in the middle of their living room today. They weren’t even in need of another shelf.

“Why on earth would you think I’d get _bored_ -“

“You’re an Amazonian warrior princess! You’re a literal _goddess_ , you’re virtually invincible, and you can _fly_! I’m jus’ some girl from Brooklyn, who cheated her way through college and then shacked up with a murderous, abusive psychopath. That’s pretty much all I have goin’ for me, and none of those things I’m exactly proud of.”

All Diana could do was stare at the other woman; admittedly quite dumbfounded. She’d never worried about Harley having any inadequacy issues – the possibility had never even occurred to her.

“You don’t need to prove yourself to me”, she said, shaking her head, “you know that, right?”

“Sure I do”, Harley said quietly, “it’s jus’... if ya always have to take care of me and do things for me because I can’t do them on my own, I’m more of a nuisance than a girlfriend, aren’t I?”

Diana suppressed the sudden urge to take Harley by her shoulders and shake those stupid thoughts right out of her head.

“I _enjoy_ taking care of you, Harley”, she said instead, her eyes searching for Harley’s, “why is that such a difficult thing for you to understand?”

Harley avoided her gaze and locked her eyes onto her thumb instead. She mumbled something incomprehensible.

“Look”, Diana continued, and Harley’s eyes slowly travelled upwards again, “I don’t care about your past, or about the fact that you can’t bench press eight hundred pounds.”

That coaxed a tiny smile out of the blonde.

“I love you for your humor and your optimism, and for your heart of gold. Nothing else matters.”

“Really?” Harley whispered, and Diana’s heart almost broke in two at the utter disbelief on her face.

“Really”, she emphasized, scooting a bit closer and lightly grasped Harley’s face between her hands.

“Pinky promise?”

Diana laughed, squeezed Harley’s cheeks for a second before letting go of her face and extended her left pinky finger.

“Pinky promise”, she said with a smile.

“Ya gotta do that with ya right hand, Wondy”, Harley piped up, “or else it won’t count.”

Diana laughed again, and switched hands, glad that Harley already seemed to be somewhat back to normal.

Now there was only one thing she was left to be confused about.

“Why were you building a shelf anyway?”

Harley shrugged.

“I wanted to make you somethin’ useful, and what’s more useful than a shelf? You can put things in it.”

Diana couldn’t really disagree with her there.

“Also, I thought I’d be good with hammers.”

She looked down at her thumb somewhat grumpily and Diana had to grin.

“If you promise me to never try to build _anything_ again, I’ll let you carry every single grocery bag from now on.”

Harley was beaming.

“Deal!”


End file.
